Early on the morning of June 18, 1860, Elizabeth Packard woke in her home in Manteno, Illinois, and saw her husband approaching her bedroom door. He wasn't alone. Two physicians walked with him — both members of his own congregation, both familiar faces from her Bible class — and behind them, the county sheriff.
She locked the door. He answered with an axe, breaking through the window to get to her.
The only trial she ever got
What Elizabeth Packard had actually done, in the months before that morning, was disagree with her husband. Theophilus Packard was a Calvinist minister; his wife had grown drawn to Universalism and Swedenborgian ideas, and had said so, out loud, in the very Bible class the two physicians now standing in her bedroom belonged to. Congregants seem to have found her interesting. Her husband found her impossible to control.
Under an 1851 Illinois statute, that was enough. The law allowed a husband to commit his wife to an insane asylum on his word alone, backed by a single doctor's agreement — no hearing required, no evidence beyond his say-so, no chance for her to speak in her own defense. The two doctors in her room that morning performed the entire examination on the spot: each took her pulse, and without asking her a single question, pronounced her insane.
"This was the only medical examination I had."
She was taken to the Illinois State Hospital for the Insane in Jacksonville that same day.
Three years, and a husband who kept moving
Packard spent three years at the hospital, under the care of superintendent Dr. Andrew McFarland. Staff there reportedly found no real evidence of mental illness — but finding her sane didn't automatically mean releasing her; that decision belonged to the hospital's board of trustees, not to her. It wasn't until June 1863 that the board finally ordered her release.
Her husband wasn't finished. As Packard fought to keep him from committing her again, he sold their house, gathered their six children, and left for Massachusetts — taking her personal property with him. All of it was entirely legal. Under the marital law of the time, a wife had no independent legal standing to stop him, sue him, or reclaim what was hers. She finally got the hearing she'd never been given for the commitment itself: a jury trial in 1864, which took only minutes to declare her sane. It didn't get her children or her property back.
What she did with it
Packard spent the rest of her life turning her three years into evidence. She wrote and published two books — The Prisoners' Hidden Life, or, Insane Asylums Unveiled and Marital Power Exemplified, or Three Years' Imprisonment for Religious Belief — laying out exactly what had happened to her and how the law had made it possible. Then she went to statehouses and made the case in person.
It worked, at least partially. Within her lifetime, four states rewrote their commitment laws to require an actual hearing before a spouse could institutionalize their partner. Illinois passed a married women's property law. None of it undid what had happened to her — the years lost, the children taken, the property gone for good — but it meant the next woman in her position had a law behind her that Elizabeth Packard hadn't.
Why this exhibit starts with her
Elsewhere in this collection, the Hatpin Laws and the fight for suffrage follow women defending physical space and political voice, and the backlash that followed both. Packard's story is the same pattern, decades earlier and starker: a woman didn't need to picket or ride a streetcar to trigger it. She needed to disagree with her husband out loud. The institution that answered wasn't a police court or a city council — it was a marriage, backed by a medical system willing to certify anything a husband needed certified.
That combination — a husband's word, a doctor's signature, no room for her own testimony — didn't end with Packard, or with the nineteenth century. The laws she fought changed the hearing requirement, but the underlying willingness to treat a difficult woman as a medical problem proved much harder to legislate away. It shows up in surgeons' case notes and hospital records, in the operations doctors performed on women's bodies to treat what they called madness. The next essay in this exhibit begins with a London vote in April 1867 and follows those operations across the Atlantic.
One small postscript: in 2023, the Illinois mental health facility that grew out of the hospital where Packard was held — for decades named after Dr. Andrew McFarland, the superintendent who oversaw her confinement — was renamed in her honor instead.